“... many suggestions he made that evening was that, when I was in Dublin again, I should go and see Michael Yeats, the son of the poet, who might be glad to meet someone who was interested in his grandfather as much as his father – and to spend time with someone who was brought up, as I was, in a Fianna Fáil family (Fianna Fáil being at the time the main ...”

“... to Maud Gonne, and then became involved with her daughter Iseult, to whom he also proposed. Joseph Hone writes about this in his authorised biography of the poet, published in 1942. When Iseult finally rejected him in the summer of 1917, he decided to propose to a young Englishwoman, Georgie Hyde-Lees. He wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I certainly feel very ...”

“... left behind.’ ‘Gay men had as much use for condoms as for tampons,’ France notes. He quotes Joseph Sonnabend, one of the first clinicians to investigate Aids. ‘I think most gay men said: “Oh thank God, that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.”’ In 1973, a gay bar in New Orleans was deliberately set on fire: 32 people died. No charges ...”

“... desires and passions to be disciplined and brought to heel’. Berlin ended his essay by quoting Joseph Schumpeter: ‘To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’ In the jargon I have been developing, this translates into the claim that the liberal ...”

“... this, but the best is probably to begin with its dedication. The book is devoted to the memory of Michael Oakeshott – whose thought, Mount tells us, has left its traces, ‘no doubt sadly smudged’, on many of its pages. At first glance, the affinity between author and authority seems straightforward enough, for Oakeshott was widely held to be the most ...”

“... Add to this list critical race theory and disability studies – exemplified here by Joseph Valente’s bold essay on late Yeats – and you have the agenda. Guides to the territory have now appeared, in The New Irish Studies edited by Paige Reynolds and the edgy and enormous Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies. The mix of topics ...”

“... both in Heaney’s contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most recent book of his excerpted for Opened Ground. Of course, nothing in Heaney’s late ...”

“... production’. Whether Wilson expected the union leaders, whom he knew well, to bite is not clear. Michael Foot gave the rationale for killing off the idea when he rose in the Commons to say that the Left was not against an incomes policy – ‘indeed, we believe such a policy is essential to socialism’ – but that in this case the Government had ...”

“... of films that idealised the Soviet Union. This fascinates Hoberman. In 1943, as he notes, we find Michael Curtiz’s Mission to Moscow, made to celebrate Ambassador Joseph Davies’s journey of friendship to Russia in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Earlier, of course, Russia had been quarantined by America: in the late ...”

“... party that our parents were insistent should not include the children from the terraced houses,’ Michael Burns wrote, recalling VE Day celebrations in Tolworth near Kingston. And it was much the same eight years later in New Malden at the Coronation festivities (‘They’re much too posh for street party’ was the headline in the People). If there is a ...”

“... offers a frightening gallery of rogue vents – from Eric von Stroheim in The Great Gabbo to Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night and Anthony Hopkins in Magic – who have been led astray by their dummy-selves; and real vents can be just as mixed up as fictional ones. When the English entertainer Arthur Prince died in 1948, his jolly partner Jim was ...”

“... reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.’ During the Second World War, Joseph Sr could have been forgiven for thinking he was on the way to being rich. He worked for his uncle Bill Sheen, the inventor of a sealant used in cemetery vaults and a military contractor. The job came with perks: free plane tickets, a Buick Roadster and a ...”

“... military had prepared in advance the following directive for their civil superior to sign: ‘I, Joseph Luis Canepa, Commissioner of Police, having considered the terrorist situation in Gibraltar and having been fully briefed on the military plan with firearms, request that you proceed with the military option which may include the use of lethal force for ...”

“... to be cited exactly rather than tidied up. On one occasion this is to honour incoherence, when Dr Joseph Sonnabend struggles to express his feelings: I’m very sad, for example, sad – I don’t know, I can’t find the right word – but if I think of the people in the earliest years, the patients who, or people with Aids, who died horribly, and who ...”

“... the Germans were in full murder mode. Historical information and interpretation, based largely on Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews, have also been added. The 2503 photographs themselves: these have been reproduced from identity cards and gravestones, from formal studio portraits and intimate snapshots, from school, camp and ...”